Yet another Hacker News

The Commodore 64 hardware simulator: break chips and pins, see the results

39 points antirez 2 days ago 4 comments

NikolaNovak 1 hour ago | parent

This is awesome!

I just got a commodore 64 ultimate last week to play with my son but also nerd out on - the more I use ai at work, the more I miss the pleasure of hand coding and fully owning / understanding a piece of hardware. I wrote my first BASIC program in 35 years last weekend, a version of wordle for his birthday with special birthday cake PETSCII art if his name is entered. I never really geeked put about hardware at such physical / electrical level, so this'll be fun to play with :).

There's so much AI slop everywhere, including c64 community now, but gems like this also come out so I suppose / hope it balances.

dwheeler 50 minutes ago | parent

Amazing. Sadly, it can't run in real time even on strong real hardware. I wonder if its code could be optimized to run in real time?

rzzzt 19 minutes ago | parent

The README mentions floooh's implementation which is a bit more simplified, there is no complete netlist so the smaller TTL glue chips will not be considered. It does work in real time though. The common interface between emulated ICs is a 64-bit integer that maps logic levels of interest at a given simulation step to its individual bits:

- https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/master/README.md

- https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/9e88298ce56319953ac7a43...

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/player.html?id=c64&dbg=1 (use the "Hardware" menu to get activity views similar to Salvatore's emulator)

kxrm 10 minutes ago | parent

I have been working on this exact same thing. Using real hardware, I am trying to simulate down to the jail bars that are caused by the design.

LLMs make this kind of development really approachable.

What is fascinating is I can now build components that work through an Arduino to interface with real accessories and C64s.